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"Constance Lindsay Skinner made a living as a writer at a time when few men, and even fewer women, managed the feat. Born in 1877 on the British Columbia frontier, she worked as a journalist in Vancouver, Los Angeles, and Chicago, before moving to New York City in 1912, where she supported herself by her pen until her death in 1939. Despite a prolific output - poetry, plays, short stories, histories, reviews, adult and children's novels - and in contrast to her reputation in the United States, she has remained virtually unknown in the country of her birth." "Reconstructing Constance Lindsay Skinner's writing life from her papers in the New York Public Library and from her publications, Jean Barman suggests several reasons for Skinner's success. As well as a capacity to respond to market forces by moving between genres, she possessed an aura of authenticity by virtue of her Canadian frontier heritage. As literary device, the frontier also gave her the freedom to tackle contentious issues, such as Aboriginal and hybrid identities, gender, and sexuality, that might otherwise have been far more difficult to get into print. Last, but very important to Skinner's writing career, was the willingness to subordinate her private self to the life of the imagination."... "Barman ponders Constance Lindsay Skinner's absence from the Canadian literary canon. She mixed with such twentieth-century personalities as Jack London, Harriet Monroe, Frederick Jackson Turner, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Cornelia Meigs, Long Lance, and Margaret Mitchell, yet was unreconized in her own country. Her sex was a factor, just as it was for fellow Canadian women writers. So was her facility at multiple genres, a talent that, even as it made possible a writing life, prevented her from achieving a major breakthrough in any one of them. Perhaps the most important factor was her identification with the frontier of a nation whose centre long shaped literary matters in its own image. Constance Lindsay Skinner makes a significant contribution to Canadian and American history and to literary and gender studies."--Jacket.
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